Anders Hejlsberg has been doing the impossible since his first foray into programming language and compiler design in 1980. An engineering prodigy, Anders was born in and grew up in Denmark, and he was lucky enough to attend one of the first high schools in the country to offer its students access to a computer, an HP 2100. After learning the ALGOL programming language on that computer, he enrolled in an engineering academy, and he started a software company with a schoolmate.

His first work with microcomputers came at age 20 with the Nascom kit computer, which was based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and came with Microsoft BASIC in ROM.